Dark Horses

Karl Miller

Picador, #16.99

A career in literary journalism seems an unpromising subject for a memoir: it implies a severely stunted social life: every friendship with a professional writer a minefield of sensitivities and ego, every wrangle a diplomatic challenge, every evening spent in a book or over the galleys to protect a touchy reviewer's inviolable semi-colons.

Karl Miller is considerably more interesting than he has any right to be. His journey from literary editor at the Spectator, to the New Statesman, to the Listener, to founder-editor of the London Review of Books ought to read like something by Primo Levi, appalling but uplifting, yet he has somehow emerged with his wits and humour intact. He is a benign observer of literary giants and their cats. Even the rows he describes are altogether delicate affairs of inference rather than thunderous histrionics, and the subtleties of the barbs received or inflicted are quite often quite complicated and challenging to work out.

Kingsley Amis evidently gave notice that his friendship with Miller was ending when he wrote a note explaining why he had left Peter Jenkins stranded on the pavement instead of making room for him in the car by sitting on Bob Conquest's knee. The end came later when Amis wrote a story in which the worst modern poem in the world was published in the Listener. Miller, editing that journal at the time, knew it was finally over. Without rancour, he mentioned the slight in his affectionate funeral oration for Amis.

V S Naipaul simply took a huff, even if it was equally incomprehensible. Miller once smoked a Wills Castella in his presence; Naipaul thought it was an imperial. Presumably this was a misunderstanding over a serious cultural jibe, but Miller refers to it elegantly as the ''intermission'' in their friendship.

Now that virtually everyone insults Naipaul as politically incorrect, Miller devotes a chapter of his book defending his literary reputation. In the pugnacious and uncharitable world of literary journalism, he is remarkably conciliatory. He recalls that the young Naipaul was vetted over the phone by a prospective landlady. ''Are you coloured?'' she asked. ''Hopelessly,'' Naipaul replied. In other words, explains Miller a trifle nervously, not much hope for the landlady.

Grumpy old Auden was more direct. ''So you're the man who's ruined the Listener,'' he observed. Matter of opinion, we would support Miller in observing. His first issue, following but not announcing his 36th birthday, featured Thom Gunn on the Rolling Stones. It was 1967, the time of Black Power, and Miller adopted an editorial policy of appealing to youth and a mass audience. This was not marketing. He believed in it. Clearly still does.

Without a hint of changing gear he can offer a beautifully observed and passionately argued defence of Eric Cantona in one chapter, and recall the exemplary inclusiveness of Francis Jeffrey's 1802 Edinburgh Review in the next. Miller, who was born in Gilmerton in Edinburgh, regards himself as a throwback. He values what another Scot, Carlyle, called omnicompetence, and he uses words like compendious with obvious approval and relish.

This tends to confirm Miller as the product of the broad-based traditions of a Scottish education, though he is unconvinced of his Scottishness and sends up prayers from South Kensington that the Union may be spared. He reports that no one has ever called him a Jock. At the LRB the biggest compliment he probably got was that some thought he was difficult, no bad recommendation for an editor.

He describes his job, modestly, as plumbing work to organise a flow of opinion through the pages he has had at his disposal. In magazines as in football, he has been a firm believer in desegregating fronts and backs, to produce a splendid pile of politics, letters, and great goals. That would be a reasonable description of this pleasant book.

J